Duration: 135 min.
Rating stars: 6.9 out of 10 stars.
Released date: 10 August 2012 (USA).
Director: Tony Gilroy.
Written by : Tony Gilroy, Dan Gilroy.
Movie story:
A new hero whose stakes have been triggered by the events by an expansion of the universe from Robert Ludlum's novels.
Movie Review:
Just before “The Bourne Legacy” gets its game on, the franchise’s new face, played by Jeremy Renner, comes out of the Alaskan wilderness to take refuge in a cabin. There he meets another of his kind, a superspy with a scowl and enough artillery to invade a small country. By the time they’ve grudgingly warmed up to each other an unmanned drone is blasting everything to bits. It’s an effectively blunt opener for a series that from its start has tracked a different military drone, this one a man fighting to recover first his identity and then his humanity. That you may not remember the name of Mr. Renner’s agent, Aaron Cross, after all the dust finally settles, suggests that the fight goes on.
The Bourne Legacy arrives at an interesting moment. The time was when athletic tough guy Jason Bourne – low-key, trained in hand-to-hand combat, modishly alienated from his superiors – was very contemporary and made poor old James Bond look very silly with his gadgets and martinis. But then TV's Homeland came along in 2011 with Claire Danes's brilliant, sympathetic performance as the fragile CIA agent whose psychological instability gives her a vital flash of intuition. Now it was the turn of gym-bunny Bourne to look silly. (And I suspect the scene in The Bourne Legacy where Dr Shearing is visited in her woodland country house is inspired by Homeland.)
Mr. Gilroy’s script for “The Bourne Legacy,” written with his brother Dan, has given him much more to wrangle — locations, characters, hardware, franchise expectations — than he’s had to deal with in the past. If that worried him, it doesn’t show in the movie’s hyperventilated opening stretch, which zips from Cross battling wolves, doubts and military drones in Alaska; to Scott Glenn and Stacy Keach as a couple of military men who go alpha male to alpha male about a covert operation and its consequences in a darkened room in the D.C. power corridor; to Edward Norton, as Colonel Byer, barking someplace else at flunkies who, not being your average hired help, can pull up high-definition surveillance images from across the globe with a few phone calls and strokes on a keyboard.
Renner and Weisz do their best to remake a film which was already pretty great. Yes, they have new names and faces, but they are running from the same agency, dodging the same bullets, but this time they have a higher chromosomal level on their side.
The Bourne Legacy will be known as that film which derailed the very respectable Bourne franchise. Paul Greengrass, the director of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, was correct when he said any further film would feel like The Bourne Redundancy.
Reviewed by: Riham Adel